Technology and Humans: The Secret to Creativity at the Karajan Institute

The Karajan Institute uses technology heavily to accomplish their work with a small team. They have a large database with information on events from Herbert von Karajan’s life, including dates, locations, artists, and composers. They use this database to create daily posts for their communication team to brainstorm ideas for social media.

A lot of people ask me how we at the Karajan Institute, get all of the things done that we’re doing, given that it’s really a small team. The secret behind this is, of course, that we use technology heavily. In most of what we do, we work with databases.

For instance, we have a huge database with all kinds of events from Herbert von Karajan’s life. We know when he gave a concert, where he gave it, when he recorded a piece of music, where he recorded it. We know all of the artists involved, the composers of course of the works, and for each and everything we have a date in the database.

Not only is this database the basis of the Discover-Karajan Plattform (www.discoverkarajan.com), we also use it to create reminders about upcoming events related to Herbert von Karajan’s life and works.

How does this work? We wrote a dedicated computer program that looks at the dates every day and computes whether there are any upcoming round birthdays, jubilees around Karajan’s content and the people he worked with.

And then the program creates a mini post that we sent to a dedicated channel on our Slack server. This is where the whole communication team gets the information and based on that data, we then brainstorm the types of stories we want to create, the types of posts we want to do for social media. So the whole social media communication is really based around this central database that we created.